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This is an advert for McCains Rustic Oven Chips. I like McCains Rustic Oven Chips. They’re probably my favourite rustic oven chips. I have no problem with the chips. I like the chips. I don’t like this advert though.

I don’t think I have ever knowingly directed tourists the wrong way. Why would I? How does it benefit me? I may, on occasion, have pretended not to know where somewhere was because the route is quite complicated and it would be impossible to explain and anyway, if ever anyone asks for directions, they stop listening once you get past “OK, well, you carry on up that way and then turn right”. There might also be times when I have misunderstood where it was they were wanting to go and given them accurate directions to somewhere else. I might even have realised this immediately after but felt too self-conscious to correct my mistake. Here, you could argue I have knowingly allowed tourists to go in the wrong direction, but I would argue that, on a moral level, that is not the same as knowingly giving them wrong directions in the first place. One is based on social embarrassment and self-consciousness, the other is just mean.

There can only be one reason why someone would knowingly give tourists the wrong directions, and that is because they think it is funny to do so. They think it’s funny to inconvenience total strangers. They don’t care that they won’t actually be able to see the moment where the tourists get completely lost, they are satisfied just to know that somewhere, someone is having a shitty time all because of them.

None of this has much to do with chips, you might think. McCains Rustic Oven Chips contain 3% fat. This is quite good apparently. I’m not sure how much fat other oven chips contain, but I’m fairly sure it’s more than 3%. Because these chips are relatively low in fat, it means you can eat them without feeling guilty. Guilt. This campaign is all about guilt.

McCains have set up a Facebook page where people can confess their guilty secret and win a trip to New York. The theory seems to be, that because there is no need to feel guilty for eating the chips, we should somehow celebrate the other things we feel guilty about. It’s almost as if they believe that humans need a certain minimum level of guilt in order to operate, and by removing the guilt from eating chips, we need to maintain that guilt level by rejoicing in every other shitty thing we’ve ever done.

“Rustic Farmer Ben” doesn’t even look like he feels guilty. Look at his face:

Look at that smug, self-satisfied smirk on his face. That’s not the face of a man racked with guilt. That’s the face of a smug bastard. Fuck you, Rustic Farmer Ben.

According to wikipedia : “Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation.”

I think the key point here is ‘violated a moral standard’.

Exactly what is ‘morally’ wrong with eating any kind of bloody oven chips? Yes they might be highly calorific but that’s an issue of energy not morals. It’s nonsense. All oven chips are 100% guilt free. If not surely we should be locking them up?

The man is obviously a fraud; look at that shirt. It’s too obviously country boy and rustic. Observe his eyebrows. What kind of farmer plucks his eyebrows? McCains have been left with egg on their faces. Which’ll go nice with the chips, mind.

I think he’s saying with that look: Hey there, wanna suck on this big fat “chip” in a provocative manner? Is THAT your guilty pleasure….?

When I was young and silly, if anyone (in a car) stopped beside me and wanted to get directions, I would say, “Just keep goin’…it’s half an hour in that direction.” They all seemed pleased and satisfied. (Most people don’t want THE answer, just AN answer.)

BTW — McCains can also be faulted for stealing the idea on this long-running site: http://www.postsecret.com/
A fresh batch of postcards sent in is posted every Sunday morning.

The WEB is also now the go-to source for recycling ideas for TV shows, like it’s some melting pot of human sub-consciousness that can be re-used without us remembering. But then maybe most people can’t, their attention spans as short as their memories — feed me NEW stuff…like gold fish. And the internet is reinforcing the A.D.D.

I just finished a digital graphic collaging scanned objects picked up from the ground. It looks like
a gothic cathedral, but the title is — The Church of Perpetual Accumulation. (The central
stained glass is a scanned circular solar panel sensor.)

I hate this whole stupid shitty series of adverts. The tourists one makes no sense. But there’s another one: “Sharing your phone call with the whole carriage guilt?”. That is just insane. Just as you explain in a subsequent post, with regard to people blocking the bar or not moving down the carriage, they can only be doing it because they (a) don’t realise how much they are annoying people or (b) are evil. Is it credible that a passenger would sit there bawling out a stream of tedious, tedious drivel, thinking yeah, this must be really pissing people off, oh god, maybe everyone hates me, agh I feel so guilty, nevertheless I’m going to KEEP ON TALKING AT THIS VOLUME, oh god, mary forgive me etc?

Ha! Good for you. I agree. I have just done a post on my blog about the ad campaign on London Underground where the same character celebrates not giving up his seat on the tube (presumably not an elderly or disabled person or a pregnant woman) by eating some McCain’s rustic chips. Who on earth could have thought this campaign was a good idea?